Friday 25 July 2008 06.44 EDT
First published on Friday 25 July 2008 06.44 EDT

I've been recommendingXdrive online storage for several years because it worked, you could sign up with an AOL account, it had been around a long time, and it was backed by one of the web's biggest and richest companies. But none of that turned out to be enough. AOL's Kevin Conroy has sent staff a re-org memo (published by TechCrunch) that announces the "sunsetting" of XDrive, AOL Pictures, MyMobile and Bluestring. The memo says:

There was a time at AOL when the strengths of our aggregate portfolio of products more than compensated for the weakness of an underperforming product. The realities of the industry and market shifts in online advertising no longer make that possible.

To be specific:

Personal Media: Bluestring, Xdrive and AOL Pictures will be sunset. These consumer storage products haven't gained sufficient traction in the marketplace or the monetization levels necessary to offset the high cost of their operation.

Translation: AOL used to dominate the web advertising market but now Google has taken all the money we can no longer afford to provide the old level of services.

It's possible that AOL will provide a migration path to other services. However, if you have stuff on these services, you may well need to download it and reupload it somewhere else.

Among the things that the cloud-computing hype-merchants don't tell you is that cloud-computing companies can have catastrophic technical failures, can go bust, or can simply decide that the service you're banking on no longer fits their strategic and/or financial goals. And those are just a few of the ways you can get screwed.